


Twilight Interlude

by bewaare



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-17 22:03:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3545360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bewaare/pseuds/bewaare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the place where it always begins. The place they always return to.</p><p>The boy in the mirror has his face. The man in the crowd looks like home.</p><p>"Looks like my vacation is over." He doesn't cry, but he wants to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twilight Interlude

**Author's Note:**

> Kingdom Hearts belongs to Square Enix.
> 
> This is the origin point that all my KH fics diverge from.

This is the place they always return to.

The sun hangs in the sky, swollen peach and gold. There is no velvet night. The stars dot purple cotton candy until midnight where, for just a moment, it looks like the black they’ve heard about might envelop the sky. Then dawn begins, pale and full of yellow streamers. The brine of seawater echoes here. The sound of waves follows, inevitably.

This Roxas has never seen the ocean. The lull of waves that rushes in before he’s fully awake is hazy, half-remembered, like a memory that might not be a memory. Lately, the smell of the sea doesn’t fade so quickly. It lingers with him as he pushes his hair out of his face, as he touches his tepid floor, as he twists the tap in the bathroom and brushes his teeth.

He’s stopped looking into the mirror. Sometimes the face that stares back isn’t his. They’re similar, eerily so, but it’s different. The shape of their eyes is the same, but where those eyes look like a warm summer sky he’s never seen, Roxas’ eyes are dark. They have depths like the depths of the sea. They look like an ocean bottom. Their lips make the same shapes as they move, their cheekbones hold the same hollows, their ears stick out the same way. Their necks are both too skinny.

The boy in the mirror doesn’t look sad.

Roxas ducks his head to scrub his teeth and spits, closing them as he lifts his head and turns away from the mirror. The boy looks at him from inside the glass. Roxas rubs a hand against his face, tears it through his hair, scratches his belly, shifts his weight between two chilled feet, yawns. Dawn has passed and the twilight he knows well has settled comfortably for the eternal afternoon. Summer is almost over.

He doesn’t know this, of course, but summer has been almost over for two years. It has hung in this turbulent pause while the boy in the mirror, a reflection of what could have been that Roxas recognizes in the way he might or might not recognize himself in the faces of strangers, dreams. Lately the sound of the ocean has been getting louder. It thunders between Roxas’ ears. He can taste the salt when he wakes, can feel it sting his eyes. Sometimes he wakes alone to the sound of laughter.

Today something is different. The afternoon looks as languid as always, the soft cries of distant gulls like static. The bell tower lets out a ringing clap. The town mulls below in the streets, their lives separate from the one that Roxas lives, their feet tracing familiar patterns. Roxas can feel something, like a tear in fabric. It echoes around him like a shot, over and over, and he tugs on his shirt without a real destination in mind. He has obligations today, but that tear widens and he pulls on his socks, shoves his feet into his shoes, doesn’t bother to look at the mirror, tears a furious hand through his hair, feels a cold knot form in his stomach.

Today is the day that the dreams become real. Roxas remembers things, distant and blurry. They’re shapes, mostly, blocks of color, distorted sounds, unfamiliar smells. He dreamed of red, of rain, of buildings impossibly tall and concrete streets. A soft melody dogs his steps. He doesn’t kiss his mother as he steps around her and slips through the door, shoving his hands in his pockets as that lump grows colder. It feels like it might burn him up, the way snow does when you feel too cold.

People call out to him but he doesn’t hear them. They’re shapes. The red feels familiar, ghosts of spikes and the distinct impression of a green Roxas has never seen in the world around him. He looks for it everywhere. In the grass, on the leaves, in the shops where shirts hang to his knees, in the eyes of people he’s known his whole life but feel like strangers. There is a pair of eyes that Roxas recognizes. They stop him short.

A man, impossibly tall, impossibly thin, impossibly _real_ stands in the center of a milling crowd with his hand against his forehead. Roxas steps behind a cart and stuffs a hand in his mouth. It keeps his heart in his chest. The man looks past him, searching for something he can’t see, and Roxas gets a face-full of the most green eyes he’s ever seen. The man looks wrong, like someone cut him out of a magazine and stuck him in a disjointed collage. He’s too angular, too sharp, he’s loud when he yells. Roxas squeezes his eyes shut and listens to the sound.

It sounds like waves. It sounds like a crack of thunder. It sounds like home.

Roxas bites his hand until it bleeds and the man wanders out of the crowd and away from his burning sight. It drips red onto the cobblestones. Roxas covers it with a shaking hand and presses them against his chest, feeling his knees weakening. Salt assaults his tongue, prickles his eyes, rushes up his nose. That pit in his stomach expands. It feels bottomless, a black hole. Roxas’ heart thunders.

Roxas goes home. His mother knocks on his door; his friends yell at his window; he buries his face in his pillow; the day passes. Twilight turns to dusk and he glances out his window. It is the first time the sky has looked black. For just that one moment he can see the stars in their thousands, dotting the sky and lighting it up, and Roxas feels an ache that he’d forgotten.

_The stars, all those worlds, they’re going out one by one._

_If there are other worlds out there, I wanna see them all._

Blackness consumes him. The dreams are vivid that night, too bright, too hard, and Roxas wakes up to blood in his mouth and a chill that takes all morning to go away. He ducks his head under the shower and sighs.

“Another dream about him…” he whispers.

If he is referring to the boy in the mirror or the man in the street, he doesn’t know, but today he looks in the mirror and stares at the constant sleeper. Bags have taken up residence under Roxas’ eyes. They’re purple, tiny flowers, hard bruises. Roxas rubs a weary thumb over them and washes his face with cold water. There are three days left to a school project left for the last minute, like always. Summer vacation is almost over.

Things are moving now. The sleeper is still dreaming, but not for long. The knot in Roxas’ stomach feels like it might go supernova. The stranger has a name.

“Axel…” Roxas mumbles then bites his thumb. It doesn’t feel real. A distant pressure that gives and suddenly there’s red. A symptom of dissociation, Roxas recalls distantly, and wraps a band-aid around his thumb absently.

_I’ve been having these weird thoughts lately, like… is any of this real? Or not?_

Roxas sighs and lets his head fall under the faucet, twists the tap, lets the water run over his head and blaze bright red trails of irritated skin down his face. It feels like something’s eating him up, like there’s a stone in his belly. His arms shake. Roxas squeezes his eyes shut and whispers into the water, repeats names until they hang like prayer beads around his neck, rattles off half-remembered phrases until they piece together like happy birthday streamers. The sun rises in the sky. Roxas doesn’t go out.

* * *

Her name is Naminé and she looks just like someone Roxas used to know.

“You were never supposed to exist, Roxas,” she tells him from across the table.

They’re clinical words, clipped, and they sound like a needle dropping on marble. They don’t hurt like they should. Roxas drives a nail into this thumb under the table. It doesn’t hurt. Naminé looks at him, pale, washed out hair, a white dress, slim limbs, and it hurts to look at her so Roxas stares. The ache feels familiar. She smiles at him. Her eyes don’t crinkle, her dimples remain hidden, and Roxas stares until his eyes water.

“Wow,” he says finally, “thanks Naminé.”

There’s no sincerity in voice when she says, “I’m sorry.”

It falls, a mudpie, and splatters against the floor, completely still once the momentum has left it. Roxas swallows. It feels like a clot forming in his brain. The static is back. It hums at him, constant, low, incessant, and there’s no sympathy in Naminé’s eyes. It looks like commiseration. It looks like despair.

 _You’re not real either, are you?_ He wants to ask. He doesn’t. The silence stretches.

“Do you remember your true name?” she asks.

The static rushes up, thunder, rolling waves, and that pit widens further. It takes up his whole stomach now, most of his chest, and he can feel it creeping up his throat. The air sticks there. Roxas’ lips part and the air stays, refuses to be pushed out, a dissonant memory flickering behind his eyes.

That echoing despair in Naminé’s eyes doesn’t vanish, even when a man steps out of the dark and hauls her to her feet, his grip too tight, his voice too low, and yanks her into that pool of black. Roxas stands, calls after her, but doesn’t move. His feet are wooden, nailed to the floor, his knees trembling.

A hand at his arm takes hold of him and turns, tugging him with the torque, and he joins Naminé’s fate in that black pit.

* * *

 Her name is Kairi and she looks like Naminé and when she speaks to him, soft and low and full of hope he hears another voice call out from inside himself.

It is the boy whose name he will not speak.

* * *

The second time Roxas sees that tall stranger he does not see him first. It is over the sudden rush of cheering, the throbbing of his arms, the ache in his stomach, that he hears the silence descend around him the way a falling star does. It hurtles into his atmosphere, burning it up. The world around him blurs, the edges fading out, all his focus coming to rest on the whisper of leather, the soft jingle of a loose zipper, the sharp staccato of the man’s gloved hands. He claps. Loud, three times, and his voice slithers over Roxas’ head and leaves a trail of skin with it.

“Alright Roxas. Fight, fight, fight.”

A desire, muted by the sickness beginning to boil in his stomach, to see every inch of his stranger catches hold and Roxas’ head tilts as he tries to see every angle. The man’s eyes are hooded. He tilts his head and stares at Roxas, drinks him in. His eyes burn.

“You…” it comes out softly, unwilling, the air tearing it out from his mouth, “really don’t remember.”

This is where reality begins to cave in on itself. This is the redheaded man whose name he wakes up screaming, these are his green eyes, his tattoos, his cheekbones, his impossible mane, his gloved hands closing into terrified fists at the blank slate on Roxas’ face. This is where Roxas’ heart begins to cover itself in ice. This is where this Roxas and that Roxas begin to collide, and he does know this man, knows his smirk, knows the soft stubble in the morning along his cheeks, knows the salt wind through his hair, across his shoulders, knows the slope of his back.

Roxas doesn’t remember him, though, doesn’t remember what he represents, doesn’t understand the trepidation and the desire, so he says nothing and lets him believe what he wants.

"Talk about blank with a capital B," Axel says and drops into a familiar stance.

Roxas could reach out and trace it, follow the tension, the subtle curve, the sharp protrusions of Axel's shoulder blades, but he doesn't. "What's going on?" he asks instead.

* * *

 "The Roxas that I know is long gone."

* * *

 “Axel,” Roxas mumbles. He stares at the boy in the mirror. “Axel, Axel, Axel,” he says, again and again, growing in volume, and watches the boy’s eyes flicker beneath his closed lids. He slaps the mirror. “You’re not Axel,” he says finally, to his knuckles. “You’re… you’re—,”

He can’t say it.

He’s a memory. A distant face brought up close, an image clarified, all flaws smoothed, the creases bent into nonexistence. A sliver of jealousy brought them into being and, without a second thought, Roxas had been inserted into their lives. Just a line of coding. He could remember them: their laughter; Olette’s wide, dark eyes; the way that Hayner’s grin was just slightly crooked; Pence’s favorite chips.

He wonders how Ansem knew how to make them so human. Ansem. An entire world created just for Roxas, a holding cell, a interlude while Sora slept. Not detail was spared. Roxas had been Inserted like you might a flash drive, or transfer a file, or finish paperwork at the office, business as usual, and then been here to flourish in this bordered world.

 _I know now,_ he realizes, _why we never made it to the beach._ There was no beach. Ansem had never written a beach for him, though he supposes he could have but why would he? Roxas was a block of code, a strip of information. A means to an end. A recovery bank.

They’re sleeping, the two of them, but the dreams are getting worse. They’re almost ready to wake up.

* * *

 This is the third time they meet. It is in the basement of the white mansion where Roxas has traced the patterns he hates into the wood over and over, where he descends the hidden staircase, where he wanders the white halls, where he stops before the room and stuffs a hand into his mouth. He bites down on it but the tears spill over anyway. The stone in his belly weighs him down. It feels like someone tore up the street, crushed it up, poured the sludge down his throat and let it settle, and when Roxas touches his belly it refuses to give, and his throat is tight and his chest feels compressed. It’s agony, to be suffocated to death so slowly by despair.

Roxas inhales sharply and wipes his eyes with his wrist, rubs his face raw, sniffs until his nose is dry, hopes his eyes aren’t red, and steps into the room. “Axel,” he pronounces, calmly, clearly, just loud enough for the man to hear.

“You remember,” Axel whispers.

Roxas lifts a hand to examine his palm, a tiny scar that wasn’t there before glimmering in the half-light. He remembers it now. He remembers his last words. He remembers Axel.

“I’m touched,” he continues, gaining strength, “but it’s too late!”

There’s no fury, just desperation, just terror, just a calm sense that if someone has to die then Roxas has to die and if Roxas has to die then Axel has to be the one to…

_No one would miss me._

_I would._

_You did,_ he thinks, _enough to come here. Enough to kill me._

Roxas wants to scream. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, he whispers in his head, just the tips of his fingers trembling, but he feels the familiar ice chilling his insides. Axel was always all about fire, but the cool distance and vague echoes of dislike and terror were always where Roxas went. That same lingering sensation had returned. Roxas doesn’t belong.

They clash the way they always had: fire colliding with a wall of immovable ice. Axel dances around, barely able to make a dent but too quick for Roxas to catch, and they twist around each other as they trade blows that begin to feel less like the dire world changing meetings that they are and more like children scuffling. It’s Roxas, in the end, who manages to skewer Axel. The man gasps and drops his weapons.

“We’ll meet again,” he promises, the words falling from his mouth like dead weight. “In the next life.”

Roxas watches him smile. His lips part.

“I’ll be waiting,” he tells him. If it sounds desperate, or angry, or like his heart is shredding itself to ribbons inside his chest, or like he might turn inside out at any second, well, there was only them. The darkness was claiming Axel and Roxas’ time was up. Who would ever tell? He turned.

There was one thing left.

Axel whispered, “Stupid, Nobodies don’t get next lives.”

It was just his style, whispering to empty air when he should have whispered it against Roxas’ skin. His eyes close. The darkness is warm, familiar, and it wraps around him like thin tendrils or ends of blankets. He listens to the echo of Roxas’ fading footsteps. Something’s different. He can feel it.

Roxas rounds the corner and stares down the white hallway, takes his time to examine the thin pods and the way flowers seem to curl around them. He stares into the faces he half-remembers.

_Donald. Goofy._

There are others, others without names, others with names too painful to even think, but they aren’t here. It’s just the two knights, suspended in dreams. The hallway ends a few feet down and Roxas knows who’s down there, who hangs like a doll, who dreams endlessly. He’s a coward, he can’t take those few steps. His feet drag. The boy looks so thin, so small, peaceful, suspended there.

A bitter taste hangs in the back of his throat and refuses to leave his mouth, so Roxas swallows it. There’s no anger, no fight left, no freezing rage to hide behind. The terror that has lingered in the shadows begins to creep in, rising up to unthinkable heights on every side. The boy in the mirror wasn’t ever sad. His gently arched brows twitch and his mouth turns downward so Roxas laughs a helpless kind of laugh.

“Bad dreams?” he asked, stepped forward, fingers tingling when his hand met that chilled glass. “Looks like my summer’s over.” With only a day to spare.

The boy’s eyes flicker.

Roxas lets his forehead thump against the glass. A defeated line draws across his shoulders. “Looks like my vacation's over. I’ll see you soon, Sora,” he whispers.

He doesn’t cry, but he wants to.

* * *

 The End.

 

 


End file.
